The NF-κB family of transcription factors functions broadly in the host control of immunoregulatory gene expression, inflammation, and apoptosis. Using Jurkat T cells engineered to inducibly express a transdominant repressor of IκBα, we examined the role of NF-κB in the regulation of cytokine and apoptotic gene expression. In this T cell model, as well as in primary T lymphocytes, expression of TNF-related apoptosis-inducing ligand (TRAIL) apoptotic signaling protein was dramatically down-regulated by inhibition of NF-κB binding activity. TRAIL acts through membrane death receptors to induce apoptosis of activated T lymphocytes and can be up-regulated by a variety of physiological and pharmacological inducers. However, regulation of TRAIL gene expression has not been defined. Treatment with TCR mimetics (PMA/ionomycin, PHA, and anti-CD3/CD28 Abs) resulted in a rapid increase in the expression of TRAIL mRNA and cell surface TRAIL protein. Induction of the transdominant repressor of IκBα dramatically down-regulated surface expression of TRAIL, indicating an essential role for NF-κB in the regulation of TRAIL. The induced expression of TRAIL was linked to a c-Rel binding site in the proximal TRAIL promoter at position −256 to −265; mutation of this site or an adjacent κB site resulted in a complete loss of the inducibility of the TRAIL promoter. The regulation of TRAIL expression by NF-κB may represent a general mechanism that contributes to the control of TRAIL-mediated apoptosis in T lymphocytes.


National, state, and local policies to prevent and control injury can benefit from the knowledge and expertise that researchers can bring to policymaking; however, researches are often absent from this process. The lack of interaction between researchers and legislators results in a chasm between two parties with a common interest in reducing injuries, and a potentially missed opportunity for injury prevention and control. The purpose of this paper is to describe two state-level injury-related bills that were considered during the 2008 Maryland General Assembly. Our goal is to illustrate one approach to translating and disseminating research findings to legislators. We describe how researchers contributed to the deliberative processes surrounding these two injury-related legislative proposals. We also discuss the critical role of researchers in the policymaking process, and conclude with recommendations for how researchers can be more involved with legislative initiatives to prevent and control injury.

Although legislators formulate policy interventions by passing laws, including those that address injury, their efforts are not always informed by the best available research. Legislators generally do not have access to research or the training needed to critically appraise and synthesise research findings accurately.1 In order to develop evidence-based policies, some legislators rely on researchers to synthesise and translate scientific literature into succinct points that can be shared with advocates and used to inform policy debates. Researchers can be an important information source in the legislative process. They have knowledge relevant to agenda setting; they can be advocates for empirically-based policies;2 and they can provide a level of depth that complements the broad knowledge base generally required of legislators.

Despite the potential benefits that can result from researchers interacting with legislators, direct and regular communication between researchers and legislators is uncommon. This lack of interaction has implications for public health. It results in …


In all major fields of international law—e.g. environmental law, economic law, human rights law, international humanitarian law, health law, peace-and-security law—demands for more transparency have recently been voiced by civil-society actors, by states, and within the international institutions themselves—or transparency has been brought about by illegal means. In response, much more transparency has been created in international institutions and procedures in the last 10 years. This paper diagnoses a genuine "transparency turn" in international law, it analyses the functions and drawbacks of increased transparency in global governance (especially for the well-functioning of negotiations and deliberations); it asks whether a cross-cutting legal principle of transparency is emerging, and what this might mean for international law as a whole. It concludes that from a governance perspective, transparency is only a necessary, and not a sufficient condition for bringing about participation, accountability, and possibly democracy in the global sphere.


Redundantly actuated parallel manipulators with two rotations and one translation (2R1T RAPMs) have the potential for machining complex surfaces, where a large orientation workspace and high stiffness are required. Considering the advantages of an offset moving platform, such as enlarged orientation workspace and improved stiffness, a novel 2R1T (2PRR)R-PRS-PSS RAPM with an offset moving platform is proposed in this paper, called M2. Compared with the existing 2R1T RAPM with an offset moving platform, the main advantage of the proposed RAPM is that the heavy motors of four limbs are mounted on the base to reduce the movable mass and improve dynamic response. The kinematical analysis is investigated, including mobility, inverse, forward kinematics, and singularity analysis. Meanwhile, comprehensive evaluations of the properties of the offset moving platform and actuation redundancy are carried out. Compared with M2 RAPM's form without an offset in moving platform, i.e., no auxiliary platform, and M2 RAPM's nonredundantly actuated form, the proposed M2 RAPM can achieve a larger orientation workspace and higher stiffness. Particularly, the maximum stiffness of the proposed M2 is 68.8% larger than its form without an auxiliary platform. Finally, the dimensional parameters of the proposed M2 are optimized to obtain an improved satisfactory workspace.


: Endonasal sinus surgery aims at the preservation of a lining mucosa in the reventilated and redrained cavities. It can, therefore, be confined to the removal of narrowing bone at the "isthmus" of the ducts or windows. Transnasal ethmoidectomy for diffuse polyposis consists of the removal of the ethmoidal cell septa, including the middle turbinate, and a broad fenestration of both the sphenoid sinus and the frontal infundibulum. A consequent postoperative care provided, transnasal ethmoidectomy offers excellent clinical results. A new suction-irrigation endoscope and refined instruments contribute to improved surgical exposure and to the avoidance of complications.


The microRNAs (miRNAs) have been shown to play important roles in the development of the immune system and in regulation of host inflammation responses. Probiotics can effectively alleviate the inflammation caused by Salmonella in chickens. However, whether and how miRNAs are involved in modulation of the inflammation response in the gut of chickens have not been reported. In this study, the impact of a probiotics, Lactobacillus plantarum Z01 (LPZ01), was investigated on the cecal miRNAs and cytokine secretions in Salmonella Typhimurium (S. Typhimurium)-infected chickens at the age of 3 days. Newly hatched chicks were assigned to four groups (1): NC (basal diet) (2): S (basal diet + S. Typhimurium challenged) (3): SP (basal diet + S. Typhimurium challenged + LPZ01) (4): P (basal diet + LPZ01). In comparison with the S group, chicks in the SP group reduced the number of S. Typhimurium and had lower levels of interferon-γ and lipopolysaccharide-induced tumor necrosis factor alpha factor (LITAF) in ceca post challenge. Expression of 14 miRNAs was significantly affected by the presence of S. Typhimurium and/or lactobacillus. Five differential expression miRNAs (gga-miR-215-5p, gga-miR-3525, gga-miR-193a-5p, gga-miR-122-5p, and gga-miR-375) were randomly selected for confirmation by the RT-PCR. Predicted target genes of differentially expressed miRNAs were enriched in regulation of cAMP-dependent protein kinase activity, stress-activated MAPK cascade, immune system development and regulation of immune system process as well as in immune related pathways such as MAPK and Wnt signaling pathways. The relationship between changes of miRNAs and changes of cytokines was explored. Finally, 119 novel miRNAs were identified in 36 libraries totally. Identification of novel miRNAs significantly expanded the repertoire of chicken miRNAs and provided the basis for understanding the function of miRNAs in the host. Our results suggest that the probiotics reduce the inflammation of the S. Typhimurium infection in neonatal broiler chicks, at least partially, through regulation of miRNAs expression.


Abstract Translation of literary texts, especially poetry, is one of the most difficult tasks; it requires mastery and knowledge of the language system and culture, and lack of this might lead to wrong translation. This study aimed to examine the loss and gain of the sociocultural implicit meanings in the English translations of the Mu'allaqat, and assess whether the translators of the Mu'allaqat have succeeded or failed in transferring the sociocultural implicit meanings from the source text (ST) to the target text (TT). The study examined four English translations of two poems; namely, Labid's poem and Tarafa's poem. The selected poems are considered as masterpieces of the Arabic ancient poetry loaded with cultural signs. This study combined New mark's approach (1988) of translation with Baker's taxonomy (1992-2011), i.e. translation equivalence, in analysing the data. The findings of the study showed that there are two types of loss made by translators in translating the Mu'allaqat: inevitable loss and avertable loss. The findings also revealed that the loss of socio-cultural implicit meaning occurred because of the inadequate use of the communicative equivalence by the translators and absence of employing pragmatic equivalence.


Background CT is the most commonly used imaging modality for acute ischemic stroke evaluation. There is growing interest to use pre-operative imaging to characterize clot composition in stroke. We performed an in-vitro study examining the ability of various CT techniques in differentiation between different clot types. Methods Five clot types with varying fibrin and red blood cells (RBCs) densities (5% RBC and 95% fibrin; 25% RBC and 75% fibrin; 50% RBC and 50% fibrin; 75% RBC and 25% fibrin; 95% RBC and 5% fibrin) were prepared and scanned using various CT scanning protocols (single-energy, dual-energy, photon-counting detector CT, mixed images, and virtual monoenergetic images). Martius Scarlett Blue trichrome staining was performed to confirm the composition of each clot. Mean CT values of each type of clot under different scanning protocol were calculated and compared. Results Mean CT values of the CT numbers in the five clot specimens for 5%, 25%, and 50% RBC clot were similar across modalities, and increased significantly for 75% and 95% RBC clots (P<0.0001). Mean CT values are highest in the Mono +50 keV images in each type of clot, and they were also significantly higher than all other imaging protocols (P<0.001). Dual-energy CT with Mono +50 keV images showed the greatest difference between attenuation in each type of clot. Conclusion Mono +50 keV dual-energy CT scan may be helpful for differentiating between RBC-rich and fibrin-rich thrombi seen in large-vessel occlusion patients.


In a world in which major technological advances have considerably boosted the use of the web as a communication tool, the analysis of digital press releases to disseminate information on the case-related activity of judicial courts and project their social and institutional identity far and wide is useful to understand an evolving continuum of professional discursive practices (re-)shaped within institutional and media (public relations) communication strategies. Drawing from the criteria of genre categorizations (Swales, 2004; Bhatia, 2004; Askehave & Swales, 2001) along with computer-mediated analysis of texts (Yates & Orlikowski, 1992; Askehave & Nielsen, 2005; Caballero, 2008; Villanueva et al., 2008; Garzone, 2012) and metapragmatic strategies of press releases (Jacobs, 1999) in a randomised corpus of web-based European Court of Justice institutional press releases, I first place the sampled texts into their context of use, and then look at the generic structure used to realise the moves with communicative purposes, in both qualitative and quantitative analyses of data. Context and structure underlying the communicative genre are then mapped onto the role and function of intertextuality and interdiscursivity (Fairclough, 1992, 2003; Bhatia 2004, 2017) alongside recontextualization (Linell, 1998; Sarangi & Brookers-Howell, 2006). The findings show that the genre typifies the rhetorical activities and purposes of release writers as they come across to the media and the wider audiences in the ongoing context of institutionalised communication, and the ways the genre effectively replicates other forms of discourses and genres at different levels of organisational structure.


With the massive increase of data and traffic on the Internet within the 5G, IoT and smart cities frameworks, current network classification and analysis techniques are falling short. Novel approaches using machine learning algorithms are needed to cope with and manage real-world network traffic, including supervised, semi-supervised, and unsupervised classification techniques. Accurate and effective classification of network traffic will lead to better quality of service and more secure and manageable networks. This authored book investigates network traffic classification solutions by proposing transport layer methods to achieve better run and operated enterprise-scale networks. The authors explore novel methods for enhancing network statistics at the transport layer, helping to identify optimal feature selection through a global optimization approach and providing automatic labelling for raw traffic through a SemTra framework to maintain provable privacy on information disclosure properties.


This paper presents a distributed control system architecture for power electronics conversion systems. Control partitioning is explored under this scheme by analyzing spatial, temporal, and functional aspects of a family of power converters, finally proposing a two level control hierarchy. Specifically, a hardware manager-controlling the actual power conversion process, and an application manager, hardware independent universal controller are introduced and implemented. A detailed description of these controllers is given using a voltage-source inverter as test system. Additionally, a high-speed real-time protocol (PESNet) is introduced for communication purposes of the proposed distributed control architecture. From the analysis presented the usage of such an architecture and controllers for reconfigurable zonal distribution systems becomes apparent.


The psychological autopsy (PA) is a systematic method to understand the psychological and contextual circumstances preceding suicide. The method requires interviews with one or more proxy respondents (i.e., informants) of decedents. The methodological challenges that need to be addressed when determining the content of these research interviews for PA studies are described and recommendations are made for meeting these challenges in future PA investigations. Ways to improve the data collected about mental disorders and life events--domains that are assessed in almost all PA studies--are discussed at length. Other understudied content areas considered include the role of personality traits, medical illness and functional limitations, availability of lethal agents, medications, and select distal variables including child maltreatment and family history of mental disorders and suicide. The benefits and challenges to using common protocols across studies are also discussed.


Stab wounds in maxillofacial region  are infrequent and rarely reported. These lesions can be life-threatening, especially in cases where major blood vessels are involved and resulting hemorrhage  obstruct airways. Treatment must be of a multi-disciplinary nature: it begins at the trauma unit to provide airway maintenance, hemodynamic stabilization, and if necessary, neurological ophthalmological and vascular evaluation. This study presents the case of a  lesion caused by a stabbing weapon. The lesion penetrated into the left orbit causing fracture of the orbit floor, proceeding to the soft palate, and did not damage important structures. The knife was removed through the entrance  wound. Fracture was reduced with resorbable plates. No complications were observed either during or after surgery.


Mutation in a highly conserved domain of a histone deacetylase releases euchromatic silencing without affecting DNA methylation. To investigate the role of chromatin regulators in patterning gene expression, we employed a unique epigenetically controlled and highly tissue-specific green fluorescent protein reporter line in Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana). Using a combination of forward and reverse genetic approaches on this line, we show here that distinct epigenetic regulators are involved in silencing the transgene in different tissues. The forward genetic screen led to the identification of a novel HISTONE DEACETYLASE6 (HDA6) mutant allele (epigenetic control1, hda6-8). This allele differs from the previously reported alleles, as it did not affect DNA methylation and only had a very modest effect on the release of transposable elements and other heterochromatic transcripts. Overall, our data shows that HDA6 has at least two clearly separable activities in different genomic regions. In addition, we present an unexpected role for HDA6 in the control of DNA methylation at CG dinucleotides.


This abstract presents a contribution to a symposium concerning the book Ontology, music, education edited by Oivind Varkoy and Frederik Pio.  More specifically, our contribution to the symposium focuses on Martin Heidegger claims that a Work of Art contains an intrinsic power to open the space of Being. If a Work of Art can be a musical Work of Art, then music posses the power to strike us and hence throw us into Being. The presentation will communicate an investigation of the philosophical thinking in Heidegger's book The Origin of the Work of Art and what consequences that thinking could generate for music educational practice. More specifically the contribution to the theme of the symposium will be an examination of Heidegger's thinking in relation to the new Swedish syllabus for the subject music. This theoretical study is animated by a living example of a young boy who is about to conquer music. Further, Art, as Heidegger describes it, is being focused and discussed in relation to how it can exist within music education. How is it possible to relate to Music as a Work of Art with the same distinctions as Heidegger presents for us, by looking upon Art as a Thing as well as a Tool but also as an as an opener to the space that constitutes the gap between Earth and World? To structure the philosophical investigation the presentation follows two main lines; one investigating Art as an opener to Being and the other focusing the equivalence between how the Artist makes the Work of Art in the same time as the Work of Art makes the Artist. According to Heidegger, this equivalence is the very Origin of Art. We argue, that the educator has an unquestionable role in this creational space of Origin seen as an educational practice. To be able to understand, draw parallels and exemplify Heidegger's thinking, we choose to relate the investigation of those two main line issues to the Swedish national syllabus for the subject Music. The disposition of the presentation in the symposium starts with a narrative that describes how a musical Work of Art has changed history for a young boy. A section follows where Heidegger's concepts The Origin of the Work of Art, and The space of Being between World and Earth are presented and explored. Heidegger's thinking is then related to the new Swedish governing documents, an investigation aiming to explore how the syllabus embrace and perform Heidegger's thinking in music educational practise. The presentation will be ended by a discussion about how music education can offer students a place in Being, and music educators' roles as being parts of the creational Origin process of a Work of Art.


Model tablet formulations containing thiamine hydrochloride [as a nonstoichiometric hydrate (NSH)] and dicalcium phosphate dihydrate (DCPD) were prepared. In intact tablets, the water released by dehydration of DCPD mediated the transition of NSH to thiamine hydrochloride hemihydrate (HH). The use of an X-ray microdiffractometer with an area detector enabled us to rapidly and simultaneously monitor both the phase transformations. The spatial information, gained by monitoring the tablet from the surface to the core (depth profiling), revealed that both DCPD dehydration and HH formation progressed from the surface to the tablet core as a function of storage time. Film coating of the tablets with ethyl cellulose caused a decrease in both the reaction rates. There was a pronounced lag time, but once initiated, the transformations occurred simultaneously throughout the tablet. Thus the difference in the phase transformation behavior between the uncoated and the coated tablets could not have been discerned without the depth profiling. Incorporation of hydrophilic colloidal silica as a formulation component further slowed down the transformations. By acting as a water scavenger it maintained a very "dry" environment in the tablet matrix. Finally, by coating the NSH particles with hydrophobic colloidal silica, the formation of HH was further substantially decelerated. The microdiffractometric technique not only enabled direct analyses of tablets but also provided the critical spatial information. This helped in the selection of excipients with appropriate functionality to prevent the in situ phase transformations.


New knowledge has raised a concern about the cost-ineffective design methods and the true performance of railroad prestressed concrete ties. Because of previous knowledge deficiencies, railway civil and track engineers have been aware of the conservative design methods for structural components in any railway track that rely on allowable stresses and material strength reductions. In particular, railway sleeper (or railroad tie) is an important component of railway tracks and is commonly made of prestressed concrete. The existing code for designing such components makes use of the permissible stress design concept, whereas the fiber stresses over cross sections at initial and final stages are limited by some empirical values. It is believed that the concrete ties complying with the permissible stress concept possess unduly untapped fracture toughness, based on a number of proven experiments and field data. Collaborative research run by the Australian Cooperative Research Centre for Railway Engineering and Technologies (Rail CRC) was initiated to ascertain the reserved capacity of Australian railway prestressed concrete ties that were designed using the existing design code. The findings have led to the development of a new limit-states design concept. This paper highlights the conventional and the new limit-states design philosophies and their implication to both the railway community and the public. © 2011 American Society of Civil Engineers.


Currently, biometrics are widely used in recognition technology; however, biometric recognition systems are vulnerable to malicious spoofing attacks. Thus, the security of such systems requires enhancements. This paper reports a novel vascular recognition system based on simple photoacoustic imaging to resist spoofing attacks. The amplitude and the delay of the maximum-value arrival time of the photoacoustic signal were used for detecting the vascular optical absorption and depth prior to vascular imaging. The proposed photoacoustic detection system detected fake vascular biometrics and demonstrated improved recognition rates with resistance toward spoofing attacks. In addition, the recognition rate increased from 95% to 97.5% as only real vasculatures were imaged. Moreover, the results verified the feasibility of using photoacoustic images for vascular recognition. The proposed photoacoustic system is noninteracting, low cost, robust, and highly anticounterfeiting.


OBJECT
The goal of this study was to evaluate the therapeutic impact of the resection of metastatic brain tumor cells infiltrating adjacent brain parenchyma.

METHODS
Between July 2001 and February 2007, 94 patients (67 males and 27 females, with a mean age of 55.0 +/-12.0 years) underwent resection of a single brain metastasis, followed by systemic chemotherapy with or without radiotherapy. In 43 patients with tumors located in noneloquent areas, the authors performed microscopic total resections (MTRs) that included tumor cells infiltrating adjacent brain parenchyma, and they pathologically confirmed during surgery that the resection margins were free of tumor cells (MTR group). In 51 patients with lesions in eloquent locations, gross-total resections (GTRs) were performed without the removal of neighboring brain parenchyma (GTR group). The 2 groups were then compared for local recurrence and survival.

RESULTS
The MTR group had better local control of the tumor than did the GTR group; 10 (23.3%) of 43 patients in the MTR group and 22 (43.1%) of 51 patients in the GTR group had a local recurrence (p = 0.04). The median time to tumor progression in the MTR group could not be calculated using the Kaplan-Meier method, whereas it was 11.4 months in the GTR group. The 1- and 2-year respective local recurrence rates were 29.1 and 29.1% in the MTR group and 58.6 and 63.2% in the GTR group (p = 0.01). Multivariate analysis showed that the MTR procedure was associated with a decreased risk of local recurrence (p = 0.003). A Cox regression analysis revealed that the hazard ratio for a local recurrence in the MTR group versus the GTR group was 3.14 (95% CI 1.47-6.72, p = 0.003). There was no significant difference in the local recurrence rate between the MTR group without radiotherapy (10 [30.3%] of 33) and the GTR group with postoperative radiotherapy (5 [26.3%] of 19).

CONCLUSIONS
The results in this study suggest that MTRs including tumor cells infiltrating adjacent brain parenchyma for a single brain metastasis provide better local tumor control.


Outlier detection is an integral part of data mining and has attracted much attention recently [M. Breunig et al., (2000)], [W. Jin et al., (2001)], [E. Knorr et al., (2000)]. We propose a new method for evaluating outlierness, which we call the local correlation integral (LOCI). As with the best previous methods, LOCI is highly effective for detecting outliers and groups of outliers (a.k.a. micro-clusters). In addition, it offers the following advantages and novelties: (a) It provides an automatic, data-dictated cutoff to determine whether a point is an outlier-in contrast, previous methods force users to pick cut-offs, without any hints as to what cut-off value is best for a given dataset. (b) It can provide a LOCI plot for each point; this plot summarizes a wealth of information about the data in the vicinity of the point, determining clusters, micro-clusters, their diameters and their inter-cluster distances. None of the existing outlier-detection methods can match this feature, because they output only a single number for each point: its outlierness score, (c) Our LOCI method can be computed as quickly as the best previous methods, (d) Moreover, LOCI leads to a practically linear approximate method, aLOCI (for approximate LOCI), which provides fast highly-accurate outlier detection. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to use approximate computations to speed up outlier detection. Experiments on synthetic and real world data sets show that LOCI and aLOCI can automatically detect outliers and micro-clusters, without user-required cut-offs, and that they quickly spot both expected and unexpected outliers.


Social media has changed marketing and branding of organisations around the world. Large companies integrate social media to their overall marketing strategy as well as allocating budgets for the implementation. On the other hand, Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) are slower in adopting and using social media even though they could be used effectively, especially during recession periods, when profitability is low and the need for retaining existing customers or identifying new segments is a fundamental component for survival. SMEs are vital to almost all economies around the world, while studies indicate that SMEs contribute up to 45% of employment and up to 33% of GDP in developing economies.

As there is a gap in the literature in studying social media adoption and maturity in SMEs as most studies focused on big companies` adoption of social media, this research proposes a framework for social media adoption and maturity levels in SMEs in Saudi Arabia. The authors' research focused on developing a multi-methodological study of social media adoption using a series of pilots in an educational context. This paper discusses how the learning experience of higher education students was enhanced as part of the investigation towards learning needs analysis for social media adoption. The authors established a scenario-based model involving student group simulations of SME activities including web marketing, customer relationship management and information processing operations. The paper covers in depth findings from the past two years with emphasis of how learners engaged with social media in an attempt to adopt new technologies in web marketing operations.

The authors propose a framework for assessing maturity in adopting social media for web marketing and integrating such technologies in the marketing strategy. The framework identifies a number of dimensions, as well as associated factors and criteria influencing the adoption readiness for social media use. The paper's contribution is twofold. First, it provides findings from a literature review regarding analysis dimensions, factors and criteria related to social media adoption readiness and maturity. Second, it discusses two pilot studies using the proposed framework with emphasis on assessing learning needs of participants, while engaging in social media adoption.

The paper also discusses the findings from the two pilots and the impact on the learning experience, using data from analysis conducted with SPSS, NVIVO and NODEXL. The authors will conclude with on-going work in applying the framework on SMEs in Saudi Arabia. This study sponsored by the Ministry of Higher Education in Saudi Arabia, aims at supporting the adoption of social media at a national level and providing guidelines for its effective use. It is envisaged that this research will assist SMEs in enhancing marketing performance and affect the formulation of a social media use strategy at national level.


An analysis of the debate on the right to development (RTD) suggests that the right is pursued as a solution to solve the problems of poverty and underdevelopment. Thus, this study seeks to determine if at the national level in Ghana, the right to development is a right which is opposable by right-holders against the duty bearers. The Study adopted the Black Letter Law approach in analysing the legal effect of relevant law. This study shows that the African Charter is the only multinational treaty that makes RTD legally enforceable. It also shows that Ghana, which is dualist, has not ratified the African Charter. It is however argued that the Ghanaian courts may enforce RTD either as international law or as a human right implicitly guaranteed under the 1992 Constitution of Ghana. This conclusion supports the notion that development is a human rights concern. It further illustrates that the national courts of African countries are uniquely equipped to guarantee the protection of human rights and the development of the African people.


Human vascular endothelial cells (VEC) line the vessels of the body and are critical for the maintenance of vessel integrity and trafficking of biochemical cues. They are fundamental structural elements and are central to the signaling environment. Alterations in the normal functioning of the VEC population are associated with a number of vascular disorders among which are some of the leading causes of death in both the United States and abroad. VECs attach to their underlying stromal elements through a specialization of the extracellular matrix, the basement membrane. The basement membrane provides signaling cues to the VEC through its chemical constituents, by serving as a reservoir for cytoactive factors and through its intrinsic biophysical properties. This specialized matrix is composed of a topographically rich 3D felt-like network of fibers and pores on the nano (1–100 nm) and submicron (100–1,000 nm) size scale. The basement membrane provides biophysical cues to the overlying VECs through its intrinsic topography as well as through its local compliance (relative stiffness). These biophysical cues modulate VEC adhesion, migration, proliferation, differentiation, and the cytoskeletal signaling network of the individual cells. This review focuses on the impact of biophysical cues on VEC behaviors and demonstrates the need for their consideration in future vascular studies and the design of improved prosthetics.


Leuconostoc are known to produce dextran, which have great commercial importance in chemical, medical and food industry. The present study is an attempt to select the best medium for the isolation of indigenous dextran producing Leuconostoc, measuring their enzyme activities for dextransucrase, production of dextran and identification of dextran producing Leuconostoc CMG706, CMG707, CMG710 and CMG713. Since, dextran producing Leuconostoc produce slimy colonies, twenty-four slime producing bacterial strains were isolated from different food sources, fruits and vegetables. Three different isolation medium were evaluated for the isolation of Leuconostoc only and the best one was found to be one containing sucrose and sodium azide. Further, all slime producing bacterial strains were screened for enzyme activity of dextransucrase, which is responsible for dextran production. Four bacterial strains CMG706, CMG707, CMG710 and CMG713 giving high enzyme activities were selected for dextran production and identified.


S tructural change is defined as a change in the relative weight of the important constituents of the macro-economic indicator such as production, taxes, imports and exports, workforce etc. Since the structure change is one of the main reasons for the growth and economic development of countries, the investigation of the trend of changes in economic important constituents is important. Tax as an important source of state revenue is one of the most significant macro-economic indicators; furthermore it is the most important instrument of the state's fiscal policy. So due to the important position of tax in the countries' economy, evaluating the trend of changes in the tax structure is of paramount importance. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate the structural changes of taxes in Iran, by Bai and Perron method, for the period 1971-2012. The results based on the UDmax and WDmax tests show that there is at least one breakpoint in the movement process of all taxes in Iran; also based on the sequential procedure all breaks have not lead to the structural changes and Iran have not had the structure changes in income tax.


Objective: To compare the levels of indoor air pollution found in a sample of public locations in Hungary where smoking was and was not observed. Methods: The TSI SidePak AM510 Personal Aerosol Monitor was used to measure the concentration of particulate matter less than 2.5 microns in diameter (PM2.5) observed in the ambient air of 6 pubs, 5 restaurants, 11 cafes and 21 other locations in Budapest and Zalakaros between January and August 2008. Results: In the 27 places where smoking was observed the average PM2.5 level was 97.44 μg/m 3 [range: 3-487 μg/m 3 ]; compared to 5.5 μg/m 3 [range: 0-28 μg/m 3 ] in the 16 places where smoking was not observed. Conclusions: The levels of indoor fine particle air pollution measured in public locations in Hungary where smoking was observed were times higher than the levels in locations where smoking was not observed and in nearly all instances exceeded the levels that the World Health Organization and US Environmental Protection Agency have concluded are harmful to human health.


Cache read misses stall the processor if there are no independent instructions to execute. In contrast, most cache write misses are off the critical path of execution, since writes can be buffered in the cache or the store buffer. With few exceptions, cache lines that serve loads are more critical for performance than cache lines that serve only stores. Unfortunately, traditional cache management mechanisms do not take into account this disparity between read-write criticality. This paper proposes a Read-Write Partitioning (RWP) policy that minimizes read misses by dynamically partitioning the cache into clean and dirty partitions, where partitions grow in size if they are more likely to receive future read requests. We show that exploiting the differences in read-write criticality provides better performance over prior cache management mechanisms. For a single-core system, RWP provides 5% average speedup across the entire SPEC CPU2006 suite, and 14% average speedup for cache-sensitive benchmarks, over the baseline LRU replacement policy. We also show that RWP can perform within 3% of a new yet complex instruction-address-based technique, Read Reference Predictor (RRP), that bypasses cache lines which are unlikely to receive any read requests, while requiring only 5.4% of RRP's state overhead. On a 4-core system, our RWP mechanism improves system throughput by 6% over the baseline and outperforms three other state-of-the-art mechanisms we evaluate.


Corruption is a symptom of weak institutional quality and could have potentially adverse effects on economic growth. However, heterogeneity in reported findings makes it difficult to synthesize the evidence base with a view to test competing hypotheses and/or support evidence-based policy and practice. To address this issue, we have extracted 327 estimates of corruption's direct effect on per-capita GDP growth from 29 primary studies, following a peer-reviewed and pre-published systematic review protocol. Precision-effect and funnel asymmetry tests indicate that corruption has a negative effect on per-capita GDP growth after controlling for publication selection bias and within-study dependence. However, multivariate meta-regression analysis results indicate that the overall effect is not robust to inclusion of moderating variables through a general-to-specific procedure for model specification. We report that the marginal effect of corruption on per-capita GDP growth is more adverse when the primary study estimates relate to long-run growth, are based on low-income-country data only, and extracted from journal papers. The effect is less adverse in studies that use the International Country Risk Guide corruption perceptions index and in those reporting estimates from two-stage least-squares estimations.


Telomerase activity, not detectable in somatic cells but frequently activated during carcinogenesis, confers immortality to tumors. Mechanisms governing expression of the catalytic subunit hTERT, the limiting factor for telomerase activity, still remain unclear. We previously proposed a model in which the binding of the transcription factor CTCF to the two first exons of hTERT results in transcriptional inhibition in normal cells. This inhibition is abrogated, however, by methylation of CTCF binding sites in 85% of tumors. Here, we showed that hTERT was unmethylated in testicular and ovarian tumors and in derivative cell lines. We demonstrated that CTCF and its paralogue, BORIS/CTCFL, were both present in the nucleus of the same cancer cells and bound to the first exon of hTERT in vivo. Moreover, exogenous BORIS expression in normal BORIS-negative cells was sufficient to activate hTERT transcription with an increasing number of cell passages. Thus, expression of BORIS was sufficient to allow hTERT transcription in normal cells and to counteract the inhibitory effect of CTCF in testicular and ovarian tumor cells. These results define an important contribution of BORIS to immortalization during tumorigenesis.


Aim/Purpose: This paper investigates the influence of university student multitasking on their learning success, defined as students' learning satisfaction and performance.

Background: Most research on student multitasking finds student multitasking problematic. However, this research is generally from 2010. Yet, today's students are known to be digital natives and they have a different, more positive, relationship with mobile technologies. Based on the old findings, most instructors ban mobile technology use during instruction, and design their online courses without regard for the mobile technology use that happens regardless of their ban. This study investigates whether today's instructors and learning management system interface designers should take into account multitasking with mobile technologies.

Methodology: A quasi-experimental design was used in this study. Data were collected from 117 students across two sections of an introductory Management Information Systems class taught by the first author. We took multiple approaches and steps to control for confounding factors and to increase the internal validity of the study. We used a control group as a comparison group, we used a pre-test, we controlled for selection bias, and we tested for demographic differences between groups.

Contribution: With this paper, we explicated the relationship between multitasking and learning success. We defined learning success as learning performance and learning satisfaction. Contrary to the literature, we found that multitasking involving IT texting does not decrease students' learning performance. An explanation of this change is the change in the student population, and the digital nativeness between 2010s and 2020 and beyond.

Findings: Our study showed that multitasking involving IT texting does not decrease students' performance in class compared to not multitasking. Secondly, our study showed that, overall, multitasking reduced the students' learning satisfaction despite the literature suggesting otherwise. We found that attitude towards multitasking moderated the relationship between multitasking and learning satisfaction as follows. Individuals who had a positive attitude towards multitasking had high learning satisfaction with multitasking. However, individuals who had positive attitude toward multitasking did not necessarily have higher learning performance.

Recommendations for Practitioners: We would recommend both instructors and the designers of learning management systems to take mobile multitasking into consideration while designing courses and course interfaces, rather than banning multitasking, and assuming that the students do not do it. Furthermore, we recommend including multitasking into relevant courses such as Management Information Systems courses to make students aware of their own multitasking behavior and their results.

Recommendation for Researchers: We recommend that future studies investigate multitasking with different instruction methods, especially studies that make students aware of their multitasking behavior and its outcomes will be useful for next generations.

Impact on Society: This paper investigates the role of mobile multitasking on learning performance. Since mobile technologies are ubiquitous and their use in multitasking is common, their use in multitasking affects societal performance.

Future Research: Studies that replicate our research with larger and more diverse samples are needed. Future research could explore research-based experiential teaching methods, similar to this study.


Abstract. The starting point for this paper is the observation that a substantial majority of 'indirect' examples of anaphora in a corpus of naturally occurring discourse involve relations which would independently be categorised as 'metonymica'. Data presented from this corpus indicate that such examples occur quite regularly and tend to be overwhelmingly of a few single types; as indicated also in the psycholinguistic literature, they apparently present no special problems of interpretation. Furthermore, not just definite NPs are involved in such relations, but also pronouns. Considerations of the implications of this observation involve constructing a model of possible types of metonymical anaphora and elaborating on a paradigm of constructed examples provided by Fauconnier to explore some of the constraints on such examples. In particular, it is found that considerations of animacy (or perhaps discourse status) affect the acceptability judgments of these examples.


Cappadocian Greek nominal inflection: the interplay of structural and psycholinguistic factors in contact-induced language change.

Having developed in isolation from the rest of the Greek-speaking contingent, the Cappadocian Greek dialects remained unaffected from standardization pressures and exhibited extensive inter- and intra-dialectal variation as well as a number of linguistic innovations, absent from other varieties of Greek (Dawkins, 1916; Kesisoglou, 1951; Mavrochalyvidis and Kesisoglou 1960).

This paper presents the results of an interdisciplinary approach to one such Cappadocian innovation, namely the development of a novel morphological construction by means of a reanalysis of the endings -ju and -ja from fusional to agglutinative suffixes marking genitive case and plural number respectively. This 'shift' from the 'inherited' Greek fusional morphology to an 'innovative' type of agglutinative morphology, illustrated in (1), has been attributed to contact with Turkish and has, therefore, been classified as a case of contact-induced language change (CILC) (Thomason and Kaufman, 1988; Janse, 2001).

(1)
'brother'

a. Turkish
SINGULAR
Nominative kardeʃ
Genitive kardeʃ-in
PLURAL kardeʃ-ler

b. Cappadocian
SINGULAR
Nominative adelfo
Genitive adelfo-ju
Plural adelfo-ja

c. Greek
SINGULAR
Nominative aðelf-os
Genitive aðelf-u
PLURAL
aðelf-i

Until recently, sociolinguistic approaches dominated the field of CILC (Thomason and Kaufman, 1988). These approaches, however, prove to be descriptive and fail to account for the actual linguistic mechanisms of change, the factors relating to the individual speaker and the language faculty or the cognitive processes engaged by the speakers of the languages in contact (Anonymous, 2007).

Hence, in order to account for the change observed in Cappadocian and in line with current research, which calls for the integration of the psycholinguistic dimension of language change into the study of CILC phenomena (Field, 2002; Clyne, 2003; Matras and Sakel, 2007), I adopt a broad methodology combining insights from historical linguistics, psycholinguistics and contact linguistics. The examination of the data available suggests that the emergence of the novel morphological construction in Cappadocian is to be attributed to an interplay of purely linguistic, or structural (i.), and psycholinguistic factors (ii., iii.). More specifically, the change can be attributed to:

i. two chronologically precedent language changes, the loss of word-final unstressed high vowels and the loss of gender and declensional marking, which altered the underlying representations of Cappadocian nouns;

ii. the employment of resolution strategies for ambiguous input by Cappadocian-Turkish bilingual children in order to cope with the overlap between the underlying representations of Cappadocian and Turkish nouns in terms of a set of distinctive properties; and,

iii. an assumption for a one-to-one mapping between meaning and form, which plays a central role in acquisition and processing.

References
Anonymous (2007). Contact-induced morphological change: the 'leap' from fusional to agglutinative morphology in Cappadocian. Unpublished MPhil dissertation. University of Cambridge.

Clyne, M. (2003). Dynamics of language contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dawkins, R. M. (1916). Modern Greek in Asia Minor: a study of the dialects of Silli, Cappadocia and Pharasa with grammar, texts, translations and glossary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Field, F. (2002). Linguistic borrowing in bilingual contexts. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Janse, M. (2001). Morphological borrowing in Asia Minor. In Y. Aggouraki, A. Arvaniti, J. I. M. Davy, D. Goutsos, M. Karyolaimou, A. Panagiotou, P. Pavlou & A. Roussou (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Greek Linguistics (Nicosia, 17-19 September 1999) (pp. 473-479). Thessaloniki: University Studio Press.

Kesigoglou, I.I. (1951). Το γλωσσικό ιδίωμα του Ουλαγάτς [The dialect of Ulaghatsh]. Athens: Institut Francais d' Athenes.

Matras, Y. & Sakel, J. (2007). Investigating the mechanisms of pattern replication in language convergence. Studies in Language 31:4, 829-865.

Mavrochalyvidis, G. & Kesisoglou, I.I. (1960). Το γλωσσικό ιδίωμα της Αξού [The dialect of Axo]. Athens: Institut Francais d' Athenes.

Thomason, S. G., & Kaufman, T. (1988). Language contact, creolization and genetic linguistics. Berkeley: University of California Press.


Multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) systems generally fall into two categories, depending on the kind of gain they provide: spatial multiplexing (SM) methods yield capacity gain and diversity methods yield link quality gain [measured here by the post-processing signal-to-noise ratio (SNR)]. We consider a set of systems from each category, quantify their gains analytically or via simulations, and show how these gains vary with the receiver input SNR and the numbers of antennas. The contribution of this work resides in both the closed-form analytical results and the numerical comparisons. We both highlight the benefits of using additional transmit antennas and provide comparisons among diversity-based and SM-based MIMO schemes. The analytical results are for a diversity-based scheme that combines selection diversity at the transmit side with maximum ratio combining (MRC) at the receive side, which we show to upper bound the SNR performance of other diversity-based schemes. We find that, for practical system parameters, the relevant SNR metric is 6-12 dB higher for the diversity-based schemes than for SM-based schemes. At the same time, SM-based schemes yield capacity metrics which range from 30% higher to double that of diversity-based schemes.


ABSTRACT Research question This study looks at stadium attendances in elite-level European football, to suggest how people responded to the initial COVID-19 outbreak. This offers insight into how professional sports will emerge from social lockdowns and competition taking place behind closed doors. Research methods The analysis focuses on the top leagues of England, Italy, France, Spain and Germany. Using panel data methods and exploiting the variation in day-to-day attendances in these leagues, the impacts on implied spectator demand from the news of confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths can be quantified. Results and Findings In Italy, England and Germany, stadium attendances were negatively affected by the previous day's newly confirmed domestic cases or deaths. In Spain and France, there was no attendance response to the early stages of the domestic outbreaks. Implications COVID-19 was affecting football match spectator demand before European countries enforced lockdowns and other restrictions to suppress the spread of the disease. This suggests that fans significantly responded to the risk of catching the virus. If this risk remains when stadiums reopen, then sports organisations should expect reduced ticket demand. This suggests that managers should adopt more dynamic and creative pricing strategies, and use their stadiums in more innovative ways, if they are to survive financially in a world where COVID-19 remains a threat to public health.


Spray-assisted deposition of layer-by-layer (LbL) assemblies was originally developed to reduce the processing time of multilayer thin films. Despite being faster, spraying largely failed to convert dipping practitioners due to lack of consensus regarding the quality of spray-coated films. In an effort to allay this concern, the barrier property of spray and dip-coated polyethylenimine [PEI]/poly(acrylic acid) [PAA] bilayers (BL) was compared. A 7 BL film deposited using optimized spraying parameters was found to be thicker than a dip-coated film prepared with the same deposition time. This larger thickness generated through suppressed polyelectrolyte desorption can effectively enhance the diffusion path of gas molecules, leading to a better gas barrier. This study marks the first report showing that a multilayer assembly with better properties can be produced with spray-assisted deposition. The ability to quickly deposit higher performance thin films using spraying opens up tremendous opportunity for con...


Uveal melanoma is a rare type of melanoma, with only five to seven cases per one million persons diagnosed each year. Patients with metastatic melanoma of uveal origin tend to have lower response rates on traditional therapies. Herein we report our experience with 10 patients with metastatic uveal melanoma (MUM) who received pembrolizumab. Eligible patients were more than or equal to 18 years old, had unresectable MUM, progressed on prior ipilimumab therapy, had good performance status (Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group of 0 or 1), and adequate organ and marrow function. Patients could have central nervous system disease, but needed to be clinically stable. Patients were treated with 2 mg/kg pembrolizumab intravenously over 30 min every 3 weeks until disease progression, unacceptable toxicity, or for up to 2 years. Between April 2014 and October 2014, we treated a total of 10 patients with MUM with pembrolizumab. Median age was 65 years, with 70% being female. As of the data cutoff date of 14 May 2015, median progression-free survival was 18 weeks (range 3.14–49.3 weeks), with four patients still currently receiving therapy. Of eight evaluable patients, there was one complete response, two partial responses, and one patient with stable disease. Four patients had rapidly progressive disease. Toxicities were as expected and were usually grade 1/2 in nature. Although this cohort of patients was small, to our knowledge this is the first such report of outcomes in uveal melanoma patients being treated with anti-PD1 therapy. In the absence of a clinical trial, treatment with pembrolizumab appears to be a viable option for patients with MUM.


Despite advances in technology and medicine, safety for working adolescents still challenges 21st century Americans. One would think that by now, in the beginning of the new millennium, America would have cured this disease of child labor that infects its younger population. Yet, injuries still maim and kill America's working youth. Politicians speak out against child obesity, and both celebrities and ordinary citizens criticize school violence, especially after a Columbine or Virginia Tech massacre. Human rights activists picket clothing lines that depend upon the work of underpaid children in developing countries, and Congress holds hearings to ensure that American consumers do not buy goods produced by these exploited children. However, health care providers, legislators, and the general public often relegate child labor to the back burner. Moreover, many diminish the role of child labor in the United States by viewing child labor as a social, economic, and political problem limited to developing countries. The employment of children in the work force should be in the forefront of domestic health policy because of its social and economic significance to public health. Even though current societal awareness indicates some understanding of the health risks of adolescent workers, statistics continue to show a bleak picture of preventable workplace injuries and fatalities of this vulnerable population.This paper defines "child or youth" as any individual 17 or younger who engages in some kind of work. In discussing youth employment, the paper does more than just describe child labor laws; it also focuses on the unique traits of this young population and the trends that characterize its employment. This gives an identity to the faceless young men and women who deal with the risks of the industrial and agricultural work places. Once presenting the current statistics on injuries and fatalities incurred by youth in both the industrial and agricultural sectors, the paper compares the similarities and differences in the major industries between youth and adult workers. It then moves into the legal arena, describing what has been done and what still needs to happen to combat child labor problems.


Contrastively trained language-image models such as CLIP, ALIGN, and BASIC have demonstrated unprecedented robustness to multiple challenging natural distribution shifts. Since these language-image models differ from previous training approaches in several ways, an important question is what causes the large robustness gains. We answer this question via a systematic experimental investigation. Concretely, we study five different possible causes for the robustness gains: (i) the training set size, (ii) the training distribution, (iii) language supervision at training time, (iv) language supervision at test time, and (v) the contrastive loss function. Our experiments show that the more diverse training distribution is the main cause for the robustness gains, with the other factors contributing little to no robustness. Beyond our experimental results, we also introduce ImageNet-Captions, a version of ImageNet with original text annotations from Flickr, to enable further controlled experiments of language-image training.


Photorefractive (PR) composites based on poly(N-vinylcarbozale) and azobenzene have been fabricated. Two-beam-coupling and four-wave-mixing phenomena were observed in the absence of an external electric field or prepoling. The maximum two-beam-coupling gain coefficient and the refractive index modulation were measured to be 79 cm−1 and 2.2×10−4 respectively. The all-optical-PR phenomenon is explained based on the photoassisted poling of the azo dye by the synergism of the photoisomerization and the longitudinal electric field due to longitudinal intensity gradient of writing light beams. The bi-hole-transporting system provides more charge-carrier traps resulting in improvement of PR performance.


The project forms part of a larger doctoral study which examines children's perceptions of national identity and its construction and importance in the world of the child in Wales. The research took place in a primary school class in the South Wales valleys, in a class of 27 children aged 7–8 years. Following an introductory activity, children drew a picture of a 'Welsh person'. They were then interviewed with their artwork about their ideas of national identity in Wales. The initial findings revealed that the young children in this study, contrary to cognitive development theory (Piaget, J., and A.M. Weil. 1951. The development in children of the idea of the homeland and relations to other countries. International Social Science Journal 3: 561–578; Aboud, F., and M. Amato. 2001. Developmental and socialization influences on intergroup bias. In Blackwell handbook of social psychology: Intergroup processes, ed. R. Brown and A. Gaertner, 65–85. Oxford: Blackwell), had a complex and well-developed view of their own national identity. The children were able to consider in some depth, what characterises their concept of the national identity. Children categorised themselves using a range of parameters such as place of birth, parental nationality and current and previous residences. These findings contribute to previous studies in the Welsh context, which have been conducted with older children. The largest self-categorisation group was Welsh but a further interesting factor was that there were more children who categorised themselves as English rather than British.


Background—Little is known about the comparability of outpatients with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and patients with IBS in primary care with regard to severity of complaints, perceived limitations, other aspects of the complaints, and sex differences. Aims—To compare outpatients with IBS with primary care patients with IBS. Patients—One hundred and nine patients with IBS were recruited from general practices in Amsterdam and 86 patients with IBS were recruited from the outpatient clinic of the Department of Internal Medicine of the University Hospital in Nijmegen. Methods—Each patient completed a questionnaire on demographic variables, abdominal complaints, related complaints, and attributed causes of their abdominal complaints. The scores of the two groups were compared by univariate and multivariate analysis. Results—The outpatient group contained significantly more men, reported more severe abdominal pain, more frequent complaints, more interference with daily activities, and a higher degree of avoidance of activities (p<0.01) than the primary care group. When each sex was analysed separately, these differences remained for female (p<0.01) but not for male patients. Outpatients were more likely to attribute their complaints to somatic causes (p<0.01), whereas primary care patients were more likely to attribute their complaints to stress (p<0.01) or their agitated way of life (p<0.05). Multivariate analysis showed that a high severity score, a large number of additional complaints, and a low score on the stress attribution were important determinants for being in the outpatient group. Conclusions—Female outpatients consider their complaints to be more serious and interfering than do patients with IBS in primary care. Male outpatients were comparable to primary care patients with IBS. More research needs to be done into sex specific differences in IBS and into the factors that influence the decision to refer a patient with IBS.


The report of a clinical study of 104 electrical accidents which befell 85 men is divided into two parts. Part I enumerates the different types of accidents as flash burn, Joule burn, arc eye, "held on" shock and "not held" shock, physical shock, and death. These are related to the different voltages involved ranging from 240/415 (medium) voltage to 33 kilovolts. There appeared to be no association between voltage and type of injury and no evidence to suggest that any of the voltages are free from hazard. There were 53 cases of flash burn, affecting mostly the face and extensor surface of the hands and arms. The 16 cases of arc eye caused no serious concern. Of the 15 Joule burns all except one occurred at medium voltages in "held on" accidents, the other being associated with an electric shock at 33 kilovolts. The majority of Joule burns affected the flexor surfaces. Part II of the paper deals with the 43 cases of electric shock (passage of current through the body). Thirty of these cases were "held on" to the circuit by the current. It was found that the longer a victim was held on to the circuit the greater appeared to be his chances of developing heart and chest symptoms suggestive of impending asphyxia, and of losing consciousness. Although about half of these men were released by an external agency and others struggled off, a number suddenly became free from the circuit without, they claimed, losing consciousness. This is difficult to explain. Artificial respiration was administered in two cases, one of whom was "held on" and was being asphyxiated. The other case received flash burns only and did not in fact receive an electric shock.


Background Increased postprandial lipid (PPL) response to dietary fat intake is a heritable risk factor for cardiovascular disease (CVD). Variability in postprandial lipids results from the complex interplay of dietary and genetic factors. We hypothesized that detailed lipid profiles (eg, sterols and fatty acids) may help elucidate specific genetic and dietary pathways contributing to the PPL response. Methods and Results We used gas chromatography mass spectrometry to quantify the change in plasma concentration of 35 fatty acids and 11 sterols between fasting and 3.5 hours after the consumption of a high-fat meal (PPL challenge) among 40 participants from the GOLDN study. Correlations between sterols, fatty acids and clinical measures were calculated. Mixed linear regression was used to evaluate associations between lipidomic profiles and genomic markers including single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and methylation markers derived from the Affymetrix 6.0 array and the Illumina Methyl450 array, respectively. After the PPL challenge, fatty acids increased as well as sterols associated with cholesterol absorption, while sterols associated with cholesterol synthesis decreased. PPL saturated fatty acids strongly correlated with triglycerides, very low-density lipoprotein, and chylomicrons. Two SNPs (rs12247017 and rs12240292) in the sorbin and SH3 domain containing 1 (SORBS1) gene were associated with b-Sitosterol after correction for multiple testing (P≤4.5*10−10). SORBS1 has been linked to obesity and insulin signaling. No other markers reached the genome-wide significance threshold, yet several other biologically relevant loci are highlighted (eg, PRIC285, a co-activator of PPARa). Conclusions Integration of lipidomic and genomic data has the potential to identify new biomarkers of CVD risk.


The oomycete pathogen Phytophthora infestans causes potato late blight, one of the most economically damaging plant diseases worldwide. P. infestans produces AVR3a, an essential modular virulence effector with an N-terminal RXLR domain that is required for host-cell entry. In host cells, AVR3a stabilizes and inhibits the function of the E3 ubiquitin ligase CMPG1, a key factor in host immune responses including cell death triggered by the pathogen-derived elicitor protein INF1 elicitin. To elucidate the molecular basis of AVR3a effector function, we determined the structure of Phytophthora capsici AVR3a4, a close homolog of P. infestans AVR3a. Our structural and functional analyses reveal that the effector domain of AVR3a contains a conserved, positively charged patch and that this region, rather than the RXLR domain, is required for binding to phosphatidylinositol monophosphates (PIPs) in vitro. Mutations affecting PIP binding do not abolish AVR3a recognition by the resistance protein R3a but reduce its ability to suppress INF1-triggered cell death in planta. Similarly, stabilization of CMPG1 in planta is diminished by these mutations. The steady-state levels of non–PIP-binding mutant proteins in planta are reduced greatly, although these proteins are stable in vitro. Furthermore, overexpression of a phosphatidylinositol phosphate 5-kinase results in reduction of AVR3a levels in planta. Our results suggest that the PIP-binding ability of the AVR3a effector domain is essential for its accumulation inside host cells to suppress CMPG1-dependent immunity.


Recently, unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) have been proposed for many applications including environmental monitoring, the oil industry, aquatic life research, law enforcement and military applications. One particular military application involves using UUVs for mine countermeasure (MCM) operations. In 2003 during operation dasiaIraqi Freedompsila a Hydroid REMUS UUV was first used to search for mines in the Northern Arabian Gulf as part of a live MCM exercise. Since then the idea of using these types of vehicles for MCM has gained much popularity. In recent years many companies, academic institutions, and research organizations have taken it upon themselves to create mission planning software for UUV operations that provide an operator with many tools to easily create missions. However, many of these tools still require the operator to do much of the work by hand. Even during mission execution the operator may be required to intervene to resolve any issues that may arise with a particular vehicle and re-task the remaining vehicles. Some of the existing tools do offer these dynamic mission planning capabilities, but many of the other tools out there do not. Our main focuses in this paper is to extend this previous work by offering a new tool that allows an operator to easily specify MCM missions using a graphical interface, automatically generate a set of tasks for a group of cooperating UUVs and provide the operator with the ability to automatically re-plan certain aspects of the mission while it executes. Our tool offers two main benefits. First, the operator can easily create missions without having to write a single line of source code or worry about details of generating a set of tasks for a group of UUVs. Second, our tool alleviates the operator from the burden of manually re-tasking vehicles during mission execution as mission parameters and objectives change. We hope our proposed tool will further reduce any potential errors introduced to the mission and lend towards successful mission creation and completion for a group of cooperating UUVs.


Global populations of livestock have shown substantial increases as result of world development. Therefore, it is appropriate that more attention be given to the economics of animal husbandry. Interventions to improve or maintain the health of livestock are important aspects of such husbandry and are the focus of this paper. It is argued that there is a need to go beyond traditional economic analyses of this subject. In particular, there is a need to analyse the social economic impact of control of livestock diseases not only in terms of variations in markets for livestock products, but in terms of livestock markets themselves. This is more informative. In addition, measures to control livestock diseases should be looked upon as investments in maintaining or improving livestock capital or quality, but this has not been the standard approach to the analysis of the economics of decisions by holders of livestock. As demonstrated in this paper, new insights are attained by approaching the economics of livestock health from these two different perspectives.


Moral hazard and adverse selection create inefficiencies in private health insurance markets. The authors use claims data from a large firm to study the independent roles of both moral hazard and adverse selection. Previous studies have attempted to estimate moral hazard in private health insurance by assuming that individuals respond only to the spot price, end-of-year price, average price, or a related metric. There is little economic justification for such assumptions and, in fact, economic intuition suggests that the nonlinear budget constraints generated by health insurance plans make these assumptions especially poor. They study the differential impact of the health insurance plans offered by the firm on the entire distribution of medical expenditures without parameterizing the plans by a specific metric. They use a new instrumental variable quantile estimation technique introduced in Powell [2013b] that provides the quantile treatment effects for each plan, while conditioning on a set of covariates for identification purposes. This technique allows us to map the resulting estimated medical expenditure distributions to the nonlinear budget sets generated by each plan. Their method also allows them to separate moral hazard from adverse selection and estimate their relative importance. They estimate that 77% of the additional medical spending observed in the most generous plan in their data relative to the least generous is due to adverse selection. The remainder can be attributed to moral hazard. A policy which resulted in each person enrolling in the least generous plan would cause the annual premium of that plan to rise by over $1,500.


Complexity in digital systems is pushing the system design more and more toward the two almost separate phases, design of computational units and design of communication structures for connecting these units. As technology grows, these communication networks become more complex and require protection for their reliability. On the other hand, by shrinking transistor geometries, the effects of soft errors are expected to become more significant than before. This paper estimates the vulnerability of MPSoC's communication infrastructure in form of silence data corruption failure in time (SDC FIT), and then uses a protection method for transient faults on interconnects that have SDC FIT values higher than a threshold value. Setting the threshold value, which is a tradeoff between reliability of interconnects and protection overheads, depends on of the application's constraints that is its measure of susceptibility to soft errors.


In this paper we introduce Principal Filter Analysis (PFA), an easy to use and effective method for neural network compression. PFA exploits the correlation between filter responses within network layers to recommend a smaller network that maintain as much as possible the accuracy of the full model. We propose two algorithms: the first allows users to target compression to specific network property, such as number of trainable variable (footprint), and produces a compressed model that satisfies the requested property while preserving the maximum amount of spectral energy in the responses of each layer, while the second is a parameter-free heuristic that selects the compression used at each layer by trying to mimic an ideal set of uncorrelated responses. Since PFA compresses networks based on the correlation of their responses we show in our experiments that it gains the additional flexibility of adapting each architecture to a specific domain while compressing. PFA is evaluated against several architectures and datasets, and shows considerable compression rates without compromising accuracy, e.g., for VGG-16 on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and ImageNet, PFA achieves a compression rate of 8x, 3x, and 1.4x with an accuracy gain of 0.4%, 1.4% points, and 2.4% respectively. Our tests show that PFA is competitive with state-of-the-art approaches while removing adoption barriers thanks to its practical implementation, intuitive philosophy and ease of use.


Purpose: Bronchial and gastroenteropancreatic neuroendocrine tumors (NET) are slow-growing tumors, which frequently express somatostatin receptors on their cell membranes. These receptors are targets for therapy with Lutetium-177–labeled somatostatin analogues. We have treated over 1,200 patients with peptide receptor radionuclide therapy (PRRT) with [177Lu-DOTA0,Tyr3]octreotate (177Lu-DOTATATE) since the year 2000 and present the results on efficacy, survival, and toxicity of this therapy. Experimental Design: For safety analysis, 610 patients treated with a cumulative dose of at least 100 mCi (3.7 GBq) 177Lu-DOTATATE were included. A subgroup of 443 Dutch patients who were treated with a cumulative dose of at least 600 mCi (22.2 GBq) 177Lu-DOTATATE before 2013 was further analyzed for efficacy and survival. Results: The objective response rate of the total group of patients was 39%. Stable disease was reached in 43% of patients. Progression-free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS) for all NET patients were 29 months [95% confidence interval (CI), 26–33 months] and 63 months (95% CI, 55–72 months). Long-term toxicity included acute leukemia in four patients (0.7%) and myelodysplastic syndrome in nine patients (1.5%). No therapy-related long-term renal or hepatic failure occurred. Conclusions: PRRT with 177Lu-DOTATATE is a favorable therapeutic option in patients with metastatic bronchial and gastroenteropancreatic NETs that express somatostatin receptors. PRRT with 177Lu-DOTATATE is safe with few side-effects and shows good response rates with PFS of 29 months and OS of 63 months. Clin Cancer Res; 23(16); 4617–24. ©2017 AACR.


BACKGROUND
The recently enacted State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), designed to provide affordable health insurance for uninsured children, was modeled in part on New York State's Child Health Plus (CHPlus), which was implemented in 1991. All SCHIP programs involve voluntary enrollment of eligible children. Little is known about characteristics of children who enroll in these programs.

OBJECTIVES
To provide a profile of children enrolled in CHPlus between 1993 and 1994 in the 6-county upstate New York study area, and to estimate the participation rate in CHPlus. Methods. A parent interview was conducted to obtain information about children, 0 to 6.9 years old, who enrolled in CHPlus in the study area. Two school-based surveys and the Current Population Survey were used to estimate health insurance coverage. Enrollment data from New York State's Department of Health, together with estimates of the uninsured, were used to estimate participation rates in CHPlus.

RESULTS
Most children enrolled in CHPlus in the study area were white. Although 17% of all children in the study area who were <13 years old and living in families with incomes below 160% of the federal poverty level were black, only 9% of CHPlus-enrolled children were black. Twenty-one percent of enrolled children were uninsured during the entire year before enrollment and 61% of children had a gap in coverage lasting >1 month. Children were generally healthy; only 4% had fair or poor health. Eighty-eight percent of parents of enrolled children had completed high school or a higher level of education. Parents reported that loss of a job was the main reason for loss of prior health insurance for their child. Most families learned about CHPlus from a friend (30%) or from their doctor (26%). The uninsured rate among children in the study area was approximately 4.1%. By 1993, the participation rate in CHPlus was about 36%.

CONCLUSION
Blacks were underrepresented in CHPlus. Because the underlying uninsured rate was relatively low and parental education and family income were relatively high, the effects of CHPlus observed in this evaluation may be conservative in comparison to the potential effects of CHPlus for other populations of children. Participation rates during the early years of the program were modest.


SNCA (α-synuclein) misfolding and aggregation is strongly associated with both idiopathic and familial forms of Parkinson disease (PD). Evidence suggests that SNCA has an impact on cell clearance routes and protein quality control systems such as the ubiquitin-proteasome system (UPS) and autophagy. Recent advances in the key role of the autosomal recessive PARK2/PARKIN and PINK1 genes in mitophagy, highlighted this process as a prominent new pathogenic mechanism. Nevertheless, the role of autophagy/mitophagy in the pathogenesis of sporadic and autosomal dominant familial forms of PD is still enigmatic. The yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae is a powerful "empty room" model that has been exploited to clarify different molecular aspects associated with SNCA toxicity, which combines the advantage of being an established system for aging research. The contribution of autophagy/mitophagy for the toxicity induced by the heterologous expression of the human wild-type SNCA gene and the clinical A53T mutant during yeast chronological life span (CLS) was explored. A reduced CLS together with an increase of autophagy and mitophagy activities were observed in cells expressing both forms of SNCA. Impairment of mitophagy by deletion of ATG11 or ATG32 resulted in a CLS extension, further implicating mitophagy in the SNCA toxicity. Deletion of SIR2, essential for SNCA toxicity, abolished autophagy and mitophagy, thereby rescuing cells. These data show that Sir2 functions as a regulator of autophagy, like its mammalian homolog, SIRT1, but also of mitophagy. Our work highlights that increased mitophagy activity, mediated by the regulation of ATG32 by Sir2, is an important phenomenon linked to SNCA-induced toxicity during aging.


Fouling caused by tetracarboxylic acids in transport and separation process chains involving petroemulsions occurs when the interfacial concentration of tetraacids becomes large enough for calcium ions in the water phase to "crosslink" the adsorbed tetraacid molecules and form a precipitate. At present, the structure and orientation of tetraacid molecules at oil–water interfaces, which influences the precipitation behavior, has not been studied in detail. In this work, molecular dynamics simulations of indigenous and synthetic tetracarboxylic acid compounds are presented to describe the structure and spatial orientation of tetraacid molecules at oil–water interfaces. Molecular distributions relative to the oil–water dividing surface along with the length and orientation angle distributions of the acidic arm groups are presented. The probability distributions determined here that describe the tetraacids at an oil–water interface can be employed to reconstruct the density of carboxylic acid groups at the oil–water interface. The interfacial carboxylic acid density can be employed to determine the fraction of adsorbed tetraacid molecules that are "crosslinked" with calcium ions based on the distances between carboxylic acid groups. The simulations presented also form a basis to calculate interfacial molecular areas and virial coefficients to employ in molecular mixed monolayer adsorption isotherms.


Background: Thyroid cancer is the most common endocrine carcinoma, as it accounts for almost 90% of all endocrine malignancies. The incidence of thyroid carcinoma is about 1-3 cases in every 100,000 population. During the last 30 years, the rate of thyroid cancer incidence has increased worldwide. Objective: The aim of this work was to determine the frequency of thyroid carcinoma in multinodular goiter in patients undergoing thyroidectomy to make a strategy to perform total thyroidectomy (TT) as a rule of treatment. Patients and methods: This retrospective study included the medical charts and surgical data of a total of 50 patients who underwent surgery for goiter at General Surgery Department, Aswan University Hospital between 2015 and 2018. Results: The present study showed that the frequency of papillary carcinoma was 6% of all thyroid diseases (from 50 patients), 60% of incidental thyroid carcinoma as the frequency was high in the 4th decade of life. The present study showed that the frequency of follicular carcinoma was 2% of all thyroid diseases (one case), 20% of ITC. Patient was in the 4th decade. The present study showed that the frequency of undifferentiated thyroid cancer was 2% of all thyroid diseases. Conclusion: It could be concluded that, according to the finding of this study, total thyroidectomy is the preferred method in benign thyroid disease for which surgery is indicated. The advantages of TT include reduction of recurrence rate, achieves a permanent cure of thyroid disorders.


The localization of mobile robots is one of important problems for navigation of mobile robots. The wireless sensor network, i.e., Cricket wireless localization technology, was used to obtain motive condition of mobile objects in this study. The information transmission between the Cricket localization system and mobile robot system was achieved for localization, navigation and control of the mobile object. The errors of localization sampling data of the Cricket localization system vary within 3cm in a static condition. The Cricket localization system can meet the navigation requirement of the mobile robots.


The Board has this day approved the financial statements for the International Society for Prosthetics and Orthotics. The financial statement has been presented in accordance with Danish legislation on accounting for foundations. In our opinion the accounting policies used are proper to give a fair presentation of the assets, liabilities, the financial position and the result for the year. We recommend the Board to approve the financial statements.


Fabry disease, an inherited deficiency of the lysosomal enzyme alpha-galactosidase A, causes progressive intralysosomal accumulation of globotriaosylceramide (GL-3) and premature death from renal, cardiac, and cerebrovascular manifestations. To determine the long-term safety and efficacy of recombinant human alpha-galactosidase A, an open-label, phase III extension study was conducted, involving 58 patients who had classic Fabry disease and completed a 20-wk, double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled, phase III study of agalsidase beta and were transitioned to an extension trial to receive biweekly 1 mg/kg agalsidase beta for up to an additional 54 mo. GL-3 accumulation was evaluated in the capillary endothelia of the skin, kidney, and heart. Renal function was assessed. By month 54, all patients with optional kidney biopsies (n = 8) maintained complete GL-3 clearance in renal capillary endothelial cells and multiple cell types. Continued, complete clearance of skin (31 of 36) and heart (six of eight) capillary endothelium was demonstrated. Mean plasma GL-3 levels remained decreased in the normal range. Median serum creatinine and estimated GFR remained stable (normal) in patients with renal data at month 54 (n = 41). Six patients had renal disease progression; most (four of six) were older than 40 yr and had significant proteinuria at baseline and evidence of sclerotic glomeruli pretreatment. Adverse events were generally mild and unrelated to treatment. The most common treatment-related adverse events were infusion-associated reactions, which decreased over time. Long-term agalsidase beta therapy stabilizes renal function in patients without renal involvement at baseline, maintains reduction of plasma GL-3, and sustains GL-3 clearance in capillary endothelial cells and multiple renal cell types.


Can discrete, single-shot movements and continuous, cyclical movements be reduced to a single concept? In the classical, computational approach to human motor behaviour, cyclical aimed movement has general19 been considered to derive from discrete primitives through a concatenation mechanism. Much importance, accordingly, has been attached to discrete-movement paradigms and to techniques allowing the segmentation of continuous data. An alternative approach, suggested by the nonlinear dynamical systems theory, views discreteness as a limiting case of cyclicity. Although attempts have been made recently to account for discrete movements in dynamical terms, cyclical paradigms have been favoured. The concatenation interpretation of cyclical aimed movement is criticized on the ground that it implies a complete waste of mechanical energy once in every half-cycle. Some kinematic data from a one-dimensional reciprocal (i.e., cyclical) aiming experiment are reported, suggesting that human subjects do save muscular efforts from one movement to the next in upper-limb cyclical aiming. The experiment demonstrated convergence on simple harmonic motion as aiming tolerance was increased, an outcome interpreted with reference to Hooke's law, in terms of the muscles' capability of storing potential, elastic energy across movement reversals. Not only is the concatenation concept problematic for understanding cyclical aimed movements, but the very reality of discrete movements is questionable too. It is pointed out that discrete motor acts of real life are composed of complete cycles, rather than half-cycles.


We investigated the influence of framed norm messages about food consumption on motivation to consume, and actual consumption of, healthy and unhealthy foods. We proposed that the effects of positive and negative message frames would vary by the type of underlying norms (i.e., injunctive, descriptive). More specifically, based on information processing theories, it was expected that injunctive norms would be more effective when framed negatively compared with positively, while the opposite was expected for descriptive norms. In both experiments, participants were randomly assigned to one of four framed social norm conditions or a no-norm control condition. In Experiment 1, motivation to consume healthy and unhealthy foods was assessed by means of both indirect and self-report measures. In Experiment 2, actual food consumption was assessed. In both experiments, the predicted interaction was found. Results show that injunctive norms benefit from a negative (vs. positive) frame, while preliminary evidence suggests the opposite for descriptive norms.


A case of sarcoma botryoides of the vagina in a 15-month old child with a survival of ten years is described. The authors review the clinical and histological characteristics of the neoplasm and the different therapeutic measures employed. They conclude that a multidisciplinary treatment is needed, consisting of surgical removal, combined radiotherapy with intracavitary radium and cobalt 60, and antineoplastic multidrug chemotherapy.


The 'arc of deforestation' of southern Amazonia has experienced one of the highest deforestation rates documented anywhere in the world and remaining forest patches are being rapidly converted into managed pastures. Understanding how forest and nonforest carnivores cope with habitat fragmentation in tropical agricultural frontiers and which species are more prone to extinction is an important tool for conservation planning. However, the secretive behaviour and low population densities of carnivores render data collection difficult. Thus, it is crucial to develop efficient analytical tools to interpret data for species distributions. Here, we use data from a long-term research program to determine the distribution of four sympatric mid-sized carnivore species and environmental factors related to their spatial distribution in a highly fragmented landscape using maximum entropy (MAXENT) modelling. MAXENT models-built from camera trapping, direct and indirect sighting records-indicate that land-cover, distance to water sources and distance from urban centres were the most important environmental variables of mid-sized carnivore species occurrence. In fact, land-cover and distance to water explained more than 80% for the occurrence of all four sympatric species in our study area. Higher probability of occurrences in areas closer to sources of water were especially important for Eira barbara and Leopardus pardalis, whereas areas closer to the urban centre showed lower probability of occurrences for Cerdocyon thous, E. barbara and L. pardalis. Of these carnivore species, C. thous was the only one that had higher probabilities of occurrence in non-forest areas. Thus, current levels of deforestation in the study region are likely to expand the distribution of C. thous but reduce the distribution of forest-dependent species such as L. pardalis and L. wiedii. This suggests that the region requires greater efforts in environmental law enforcement and education programmes to maintain the remaining forest cover and forest wildlife populations.


Protein carbonylation is an irreversible modification to the side chain of amino acid residues induced by severe oxidative stress. Reactive oxygen species (ROS) are constantly produced under normal as well as stress-induced conditions, and play a role in both cancer progression and cancer suppression. Tumor tissue are known to have higher ROS levels compared to surrounding healthy tissue but ROS-induced specific protein carbonylation and its unique role in cancer progression/suppression are poorly understood. In this study we compared the relative total and specific protein carbonylation in flash frozen human breast cancer and matched adjacent normal tissue using ELISA, two-color western blot, mass spectrometry, and immunoprecipitation approaches. To understand antioxidant capacity in tumor tissue, we analyzed superoxide dismutase (SOD) for its antioxidant activity and protein level. Our results indicate that tumor tissue has greater total protein carbonylation, lower SOD activity, lower SOD protein levels, and elevated levels of autophagy compared to matched adjacent healthy tissue. We also identified three specific proteins that showed higher level of carbonylation selectively in tumor tissue compared to adjacent normal tissue. Our findings were further confirmed using the immortalized MDA-MB-231 breast cancer cell line and MCF-12A noncancerous normal human epithelial breast cell. Identification of selectively carbonylated proteins in cancer tissue, and understanding their specific role in cancer progression may promote the development of targeted therapeutic approaches to mitigate or enhance oxidative damage of such proteins selectively in tumor tissue. Citation Format: Baikuntha P. Aryal, Ashutosh Rao. Oxidative stress and selective protein carbonylation in human breast cancer tissue [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2017; 2017 Apr 1-5; Washington, DC. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2017;77(13 Suppl):Abstract nr 5486. doi:10.1158/1538-7445.AM2017-5486


This
thesis provides a novel analysis of the word order variation in three-verb
clusters reported in the Syntactic Atlas of the Dutch Dialects (SAND). On the
basis of distributional correlations between order variation in verb clusters
and interruption of the verb cluster by non-verbal constituents, it is argued
that only 1-2-3 and its mirror image 3-2-1 are truly verbal clusters. All other
orders attested in SAND are argued to involve non-verbal elements: adjectival
participles and nominal infinitives. This analysis dispenses with movement in
the derivation of verb clusters, an improvement over many previous accounts, as
movement in this domain is unmotivated and, in certain cases, makes wrong
predictions.
It is argued that speakers possess knowledge of word orders that do not occur
in their own language varieties. This is shown to follow from properties of
human grammar. Neither familiarity nor properties of language processing can
account for these results. Verb clusters are base-generated in a low structural
position in the clause.
There is a cut-off point for
cluster interruption, which is parameterized. In West-Flemish, it lies at vP,
only elements that are merged below vP can interrupt the verb cluster.


Background: Automation and digital pathology are the trends for future anatomic pathology with the increasing workload in histology laboratories. While tissue process, embedding, staining and coverslipping, and digitizing have been available for automated use, tissue sectioning appears to be the biggest roadblock to a fully automated histology process. In this study we were aimed to investigate a tissue automated sectioning machine for both clinical and research use.Methods: Totally 77 surgical resection blocks of various organs embedded with clinical standard paraffin were sectioned automatically using AS-410 (Dainippon Seiki Co. LTD., Japan) at 5 μm thickness with the default setting (Setting A). 10 slides per block were sectioned and the last 5 slides were stained with H&E. All stained slides were digitized with whole-slide imaging scanner, and then evaluated by the image scientist and the pathologist. The image scientist scored the images base on the extent of imperfection (Evaluation I), while the pathologist scored the images based on the clinical diagnosis purpose (Evaluation II). Both scoring systems were scored from 1 to 5, with 1 the worst quality and 5 the highest quality. Tissues with unsatisfied score were sectioned with modified setting (Setting B), and evaluated again by the same image scientist and pathologist using the same scoring systems. And the scores from the two different settings were compared. Auto-trimming and barcode reading and printing of AS-410 were also evaluated.Results: The AS-410 provided auto-trimming function to detect exposed tissue for cutting, accomplished by the installed camera and calculation software. It read sample information and printed barcode as well as input text and automatically generated slide order information. It produced good quality of sections for most cases with median score more than 4 in both Evaluation I and Evaluation II using setting A. The scores of the unsatisfied blocks sectioned with setting A improved significantly when those blocks were sectioned with setting B.Conclusion: The AS-410 tissue sectioning machine produces high-quality sections with clinical standard paraffin tissue blocks of a variety of organs with proper settings. It promises high automation with sound sectioning quality in the era of digital pathology for both clinical and research use.
Lung
Breast
Prostate


The wireless sensor network is an emerging technology that may greatly facilitate human life by providing ubiquitous sensing, computing, and communication capability, through which people can more closely interact with the environment wherever he/she goes. To be context-aware, one of the central issues in sensor networks is location tracking, whose goal is to monitor the roaming path of a moving object. While similar to the location-update problem in PCS networks, this problem is more challenging since there are no central control mechanism and backbone network in such environment. In this paper, we propose a novel protocol based on the mobile agent paradigm. Once a new object is sensed, a mobile agent will be initiated to track the roaming path of the object. The agent is mobile since it will choose the sensor closest to the object to stay. The agent may invite some nearby slave sensors to cooperatively position the object and inhibit other irrelevant (i.e., farther) sensors from tracking the object. As a result, the communication and sensing overheads are greatly reduced. Our prototyping of the location-tracking mobile agent based on IEEE 802.11b NICs and our experimental experiences are also reported.